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My column today contrasts President Obama’s State of the Union hype about “innovation” and “investment” in education with the abysmal failures of massive federal spending on America’s schools. The White House loves to talk about global “competitiveness,” but refuses to support competition in our government-run K-12 schools monopoly. “Sputnik moment” — or Sputter-nik moment?

Related: The Cartel, an excellent documentary on the bloated, bottom-performing New Jersey public schools, features a telling quote from Trenton councilman Jim Coston that sums up decades of government education sinkhole spending: “There’s almost a sense that the worse we do the more money we get.”

Related: NEA Gave More Than $13 Million to Advocacy Groups, including: Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate – $200,000; Health Care for America Now! – $450,000; MediaMatters – $100,000; Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund – $25,000; People for the American Way – $64,538; and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network – $10,000.

“We’re going to have to out-educate other countries,” President Obama urged this week. How? By out-spending them, of course! It’s the same old quack cure for America’s fat and failing government-run schools monopoly. The one-trick ponies at the White House call their academic improvement agenda “targeted investing” for “winning the future.” Truth in advertising: Get ready to fork over more Cash for Education Clunkers.

Then there’s the $10 billion for the Education Jobs Fund signed into law last August — a naked payoff to the public teachers union, which also includes $50 million for the Striving Readers comprehensive literacy development and education program; $82 million for Student Aid Administration; and $10.7 million for the Ready to Teach program.

As he extols the virtues of “innovation” and “accountability,” the last thing Obama wants you to think about is the actual results of these profligate federal ed binges:

— As education analyst Neal McCluskey accurately described the real impact of the $4 billion Race to the Top paperwork theater: “States must say how they would improve lots of things, but they actually have to do very little. It is decades of public schooling — from the Great Society to No Child Left Behind — in a nutshell.” You need a chainsaw to cut through the bureaucratese of the winning state applications, but the bottom line is that the “race” is “won” only when school reformers get buy-in from the teachers unions — the most stalwart enemies of introducing choice and competition to the atrophying system.

— Among the supposedly cutting-edge programs funded by Obama’s federal stimulus program is the $49 million technology initiative for the Detroit Public Schools. The urban school system is overrun by corruption, violence and incompetence. The teachers union sabotaged classroom instruction and denied schoolchildren an education through an apparent illegal work stoppage. Yet, Washington went ahead and forked over a whopping $530 million in federal porkulus funds to reward yet more Detroit government school failure and bail out the reckless-spending boobs who mismanaged the DPS budget and engineered a fiscal crisis. The $49 million technology program distributed some 40,000 new (foreign-made) ASUS netbook computers, plus thousands of printers, scanners and desktop computers to teachers and kids from early childhood through 12th grade.

That about sums up federal intervention in public schooling: It’s a taxpayer-subsidized distraction to the local educational process that throttles true competition, rewards failure and mistakes blind government largesse for achievement.